Americans are obsessed with protein. How much do you actually need?

0:00This is Inconversation from Apple News. I'm Sam Sanders in Fushamita Basu. Today, why were so obsessed with protein? We are in the middle of a protein boom. Protein food products are a $100 billion dollar plus industry, and it's projected to grow even more in the next few years. You see it. Walk into any grocery store, and you'll find unending lines of products with added protein. Everything from protein popcorn to protein pasta to protein beer. You can even have protein to the foam on top of your latte at Starbucks. If there's a combination of food and extra protein you can dream of, it probably already exists. Like the Buffalo Wild Wings espresso protein cocktail with 10 grams of protein.

1:01As health scholars Samantha King, she's written a new book with sociologist Gavin Whedon. It's called Protein, the making of a nutritional superstar. Protein is an essential nutrient for our bodies. To build muscle and maintain other functions, it's also found naturally in lots of foods. And in their book, Samian Gavin argued that our obsession with protein consumption has driven a lot more by industry and marketing and cultural forces than by actual nutritional science. I think it helps to mark out the distinction between the idea that protein is something we need, which is true, but it's in everything we eat. And the idea that it might be something that we want, that we have fixed certain kinds of desire to. I sat down with Samian Gavin to talk about how protein became the most popular nutrient, and how to think about it differently. Can we just start with a question for me as a real, live human living in a protein world?

2:02How much protein do we actually need? Please answer this question for me for our audience once and for all. I hate to disappoint you, Sam, but we're not as you smile. Look, the obsession with protein has little to do with what our bodies actually need. Protein deficiency is extremely rare in the absence of severe hunger. So in other words, people generally only become protein deficient when they're struggling to get enough nutrients of any kind. This means that protein deficiency is practically nonexistent among the demographics that are most preoccupied with their intake. So what you're saying is, we don't need to sweat protein. If we're eating and getting full, we're fine. Yes, we're fine. Yes. I mean, yeah, it's liberating. I mean, even under the new guidelines announced by Health Secretary RFK Jr. in January,

3:04which of course increased the amount of protein we were being encouraged to consume. Most American men are eating more than twice what they need, and most women are also exceeding the guidelines. But yes, people are supplementing with protein, not just to build muscle or to get stronger, but to develop glossier skin. People take it for energy, even though that's not the primary way that we gain energy that comes from carbohydrates. There are all kinds of ideals attached to it that are not born out in the science of what it can actually do for us. Yeah. I wonder if the best way to wrap our heads around what protein is right now, scientifically and culturally, is to go back to the start. There's one guy who is owed a lot of credit for the way we think about protein now.

4:05His name is Eustace Von Liebig. He was doing stuff in the 1800s and his story with protein includes a lot of foxes. Yes. So Liebig was a biochemist and entrepreneur who was trying to understand the stuff from which our bodies are made, how food turns into flesh, what are the mechanisms that shape our body size, shape stamina, those kinds of things. And he was really interested in the potential of chemistry to build stronger, healthier society. It's a period of rapid industrialization, people are moving to cities, men especially are working in hard physical labor, in factories, in mines, and so on. And Liebig is trying to think about the role of nutrition in fueling that workforce.

5:08He's also part of a growing number of people who have come to see meat as central to a strong Europe. So he saw nutrition as an important political project from the start. And one of the most important experiments was this 1847 study where he compared the muscles of foxes that were killed in the chase. So being hunted with foxes that he had been keeping in his laboratory and had fed on flesh for 200 days. So they had this, what he thought of as a good healthy diet for 200 days. And he concluded that because the foxes that were killed in the chase had 10 times more creatine in their muscles than the foxes in the laboratory. That proteinous compounds, because creatine is a proteinous compound must be responsible for muscle action.

6:10But what's really crucial about that experiment is that he relegates the role of carbohydrates and fat to breathing and heating the body. Now all of this turned out to be incorrect, more or less. It must not be right there. The father of Western protein as we know it was kind of wrong with the science. Well, yes. And even he admitted himself a few years later that he wasn't even sure that any such thing as protein existed, that there was this one nutrient that spilt tissue and propelled our movement. Before Lee Bigg came to that conclusion, he kept experimenting with protein. He even created his own protein supplement, Lee Bigg's extract of meat. Basically, boil down beef juice. It's a thick black paste. If your listeners are familiar with barf grill, which is a popular product still in Britain made from beef extract, it's like that.

7:12It's a pasty version of molasses, very unappealing aesthetically. Lee Bigg eventually began producing his extract at scale using cheap cuts of meat from the cattle industry. It became a thriving commercial product. It was sold as a high protein supplement. And it helped spark what Sammy and Gavin called the first protein boom in the 1860s and 70s. There was only one problem. It was discovered there was no protein in it. So Lee Bigg's science, antist product, were faulty. But the ideas about protein that he popularized took root and endured into the next big protein boom, which happened in the 1950s and 60s. This one was driven by international development efforts in places like South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Public health officials had turned their attention to widespread child malnutrition, following decades of colonization and upheaval. This effort became known as the Great Protein Fiasco. This idea emerged that there was this deadly protein gap between the world's rich and

8:14poor. And it was known as a fiasco because all of this research was pretty dicey. But it nonetheless fueled this drive to get more protein into the bodies of poor black residents of the global south. Massive amounts of resources and time and energy had been put into trying to fix this gap to the detriment of the very communities that the West was ostensibly trying to help. Aid organizations pumped resources into creating protein enriched products that took the form of powers, sludges, and bars. In particular, they relied on the booming US dairy industry and shipped tons of powdered milk overseas. But by the mid 1970s, most experts came to agree that the real problem was not a global protein gap. It was a food gap. People just didn't have access to enough food, period, a food supply issue.

9:17And beyond that, Tammy says that these campaigns did lasting damage to those communities' cultural relationships to food. If you're encouraging people to rehydrate a sachet of milk or eat some kind of protein bar in place of a meal that is made from food that you've grown yourself that's cooked in a communal way that you sit down and enjoy as a family or with your broader community as a relationship builder, I mean all the kinds of things that we associate with food when we don't reduce it to a biochemical formula. So how do we go from this moment of pushing protein on undernourished people abroad to today, where consumers in the US are clamoring to buy this stuff? Gavin says it all traces back to that same thriving dairy industry in the US. You have, after the Second World War in America, this rapid industrialization of agriculture able to produce abundant quantities of milk and cheese in the dairy industry.

10:23One of the unintended offshoots of that is the production of an abundance of excess way. Because way is the excess of milk and cheese production and it's what gets left over. This wasn't an issue for thousands of years of farming because when you're making not much milk or cheese, there's not much way. You can redistribute it as fertiliser, you can feed it to other animals, you can use it in artisanal recipes, but when you produce it on industrial scales, it presents a problem and did present a problem particularly in the 1960s and 1970s and presented dairy farming at the time in the US with the question of what to do with it. The initial response was to dump it. It was dumping in rivers and sewers and in streams and this was environmentally devastating, you can imagine. That's partly because of ways, consistency and its potency, it's dense in nitrogen. In that raw form, it's 175 times more toxic than human sewage. And so when you start dumping it in rivers and streams, oh, and it really smells.

11:28So it drew the attention and the eye of local communities whose rivers and streams were being dumped in. So this leads to a phase of activism, of investigative journalism, legislation and ultimately the pressure on the dairy industry to do something else with this abundance. One option, of course, would be to produce less milk or cheese, but that's degrowthous seldom enough. Try telling that to Americans. Yeah, that's not what I'm saying. Don't act me. But there's an awful lot of investment at this point in desiccation technologies to dry out way because it's in its liquid form. It's obviously wet and filtrate it and ultimately produce the dry granular powder that we all now know, or many people now know, as the stuff in those big plastic tubs of protein powder all in the grocery store shelves, because that's the key question, right? If people say, why are people so interested in protein powder? The obvious answer is, well, there's a lot of demand for protein.

12:32People really want protein and the market's giving them what they want. One of the things we try and show with this story is, well, actually, the dairy industry needed to find a home to create a market for this stuff that they now had in abundance in a comparatively palatable form, palatable compared to liquid way waste, maybe even palatable compared to leabings extractive beef. Yeah. Yeah. So then let's move into this current protein boom. You've already mentioned that it feels culturally different in some ways. Those previous booms were about the lower class and working class. This new protein boom seems to be the biggest obsession of people who are middle or upper class, no? Yes. You're right that there's a class dimension to every protein boom. One of the things that's different about the more recent one is that it is focused much more on the middle and upper classes.

13:32This isn't about fixing malnutrition necessarily or maximizing a workforce, making a healthier population. It's about a lifestyle of optimization. When we're talking about optimization and what has recently or at least in terms of my contact with popular culture seems to be recently the language of maxing, that's where we're into the realms of abundance and actualization and at a real distance from lack or scarcity. So there's a lot more to say, I think, but it stands to reason that that would be the interest and preserve of those who have abundant resources. I guess the other part, Gavin speaking to the cultural drivers of the present protein boom and then there's also, I think, economic drivers related to the culture of overwork and burnout and paving anxiety about many things, not just food and diet, but cost of living, global conflicts, etc.

14:34And protein rich foods are presented as offering, you know, vigor and vitality and a quick fix for energy and strength and they can be marketed and they are marketed in that way without any change in the scientific status or the biochemical knowledge that we have about protein. People can only eat so much and so supplementing foods with protein and making claims about the health benefits of that and being able to charge more for that is a way to get people to spend more on food than they otherwise would. And then we end up with protein Doritos. We end up with protein Doritos. Tell me, how does it feel for you to as researchers to see protein end up in that capacity in that cultural context everywhere in these increasingly absurd ways?

15:35I think at one level we anticipated it, right? I mean, I think especially the contest stations over the place of meat in our diets in the context of the climate crisis, protein is kind of provided an escape valve for that conversation and I think it makes sense that it's growing in the way that it has. And it does as we've already said, like the protein in the Doritos, it gives the Doritos a healthy edge. They're Doritos! They're Doritos! That's what's so crazy about it. It also, it gives the impression of a variety where there isn't much as well, right? Because we can list all these different products as if they're representing different kinds of protein, which yeah, no, look at the ingredients. It's probably milk powder. It's probably way. The last time we looked on the Walmart website for the number of protein affiliated products,

16:37it was over a thousand, but if you dug into the ingredients, you wouldn't find anything like that scale of variety, nor if you look at the number of food conglomerates that were actually selling these things. There is a portion of your book that really speaks to the culture behind our current protein moment. You use this word called nutritionism, and I want to spend some time talking about it because the word kind of blew my mind. You both define it as quote, the ideological process through which the value of food is reduced to its biochemical components and measured according to its Eurocentric, scientized standards rather than taste and experience. Is that really what this current protein moment is about? We've stopped looking at food as food, and we are increasingly trying to break down every bit and part in piece of it to optimize it?

17:41I think it's something that actually unifies the protein moments, and I'm not sure that we write that, but having this conversation brings that to light because, yeah, you do see that in different, you know, what was possible in science at different moments. You see that effort at nutrition being the way that we think about food come to the fore in these different historical moments. And I think one thing we've tried to convey, whenever we talk about this, is that we think it's a real profound and tragic waste of energy and care to put so much of the love people have for food into this metracized understanding of how many grams of powder or flesh or whatever substance they should be consuming to meet or maximize these externally imposed directives, which will always be contested in any case. And when that love, that care and energy that people have for food, it could be for things that really matter, right? Eating together, the trans-historical human experience of eating together, eating ethically

18:41wherever one can, and bigger structural changes around a food system that nobody asks for, nobody designed, and most people agree is broken. So I think it really does get to the heart of something that cuts across these protein booms and is something that we try and emphasize, rather than contributing or risking contributing to the debate about differences. And I got to say, as a person who likes food and is also worried about protein, that's what makes me the most sad. When I am chasing protein in my day, I am not eating as fully as I could and I'm just enjoying my food less. Which is why we also find it tragic that the question we are most often asked is, this all sounds really interesting, but how much protein do you think I should eat? What question would you both rather hear? Is expert on protein who have been studying this for years? What is the question you wish most people were asking you about protein?

19:42The classic one would be, you know, if this isn't all it's cracked up to be, then who's interest is it serving? Well, now you got to answer that question for us. She's one. Is interest is it serving? That's a historical moment's question too. I mean, at the moment, protein offers food, marketers and producers a way of upping prices and profits on food stuff that in a way that makes it stand out as ostensibly healthy compared to the stuff that it's alongside, without fundamentally changing its substance or consistency. I think the interests of those food conglomerates are front and centre, but they're not the only ones that are peddling protein, right? So you could also look at the interests of influencers on mass for whom dietary trends are themselves something that need to keep circulating and shifting in all of them to have purchase and for maybe their own investments in protein, supplementations and different kinds of product sponsorships might start to really bear fruit if the question of how much is front and centre and what kind and when and all the other minor differences

20:47that you can easily dig down into if you get stuck on this question. Yeah, and I think it serves the agenda of the present government in the United States too, right? It's an alignment of federal policy with agribusiness interests in catapulting red meat to the top of the new upside down food pyramid. I'm glad you mentioned that RFK Jr. current HHS secretary. He has recently declared an end to the one protein. He's refigured the American food pyramid and suggested that we all should be eating some kind of protein with every meal. How does that make you feel? Well, there is no war on protein. We can start there. Okay. That's clear. Our favorite macro nutrient is more popular than ever. US meat and egg consumption has written risen steadily over the past decade and protein

21:47powder sales are surging. So there is no war on protein, but of course, that declaration served as an entry point for RFK Jr. to announce the new guidelines up the protein, amounts which industry had been advocating for and kind of solidify this muscular, Trumpian masculinity. So there was lobbying behind this? Oh, yes. And there always is. I mean, just keeping within historical theme food guidelines have always been the subject of intense lobbying. So in that sense, it's not new. I think what's different about these guidelines is that they do more clearly run a foul of where the contemporary science lands on how much protein and what kinds of protein we need to be ingesting. This is so interesting. I'm very curious you two have spent years now studying the science and culture of protein.

22:49What is the biggest way in which you've had your minds changed about something in this universe? The most surprising thing to me was the way in which the obsession with protein actually crosses partisan lines. That's the one thing we can all agree on that we need more protein, right? So liberals might prefer beans to beef. They might be pushing and promoting alternative proteins and worrying about the harmful effects of meat consumption on the planet. But they're not any less preoccupied with whether they're getting enough of the stuff. And I do just want to say that I actually really resent the protein fixation because I'm a diet skeptic by trade, right? This is what I do for a living and it's impossible to escape. So even now when I'm making my dinner, if I feel like having a bowl of pasta with cheese,

23:55there's this little voice in my head asking me where the protein is. So as much as I try to resist it, it's impossible. And that's the reality of how powerful the ideology is. Yeah. When you are faced with a cornucopia of protein options, when you're being offered the protein foam on your latte, when you see the Kardashian protein popcorn in the store, when you're about to start worrying about your protein intake for the day, what do you two do? Well, I take a photo and I send it to Sammy and I know she, if I need bringing down to Earth, she'll be there for me and I hope that I'm there for you when this happens to me because we both get sent this stuff all the time, even if we weren't encountering it in our own lives. So it's been normalized for me. And if I need to get a steady hand on it, then I'll send it over to my friend, Sammy. Well, the most recent example I sent to Gavin was just this morning, the Buffalo Wild

24:58Wings espresso proteinie cocktail with 10 grams of protein. Stop. Stop. Say that again. Buffalo Wild Wings espresso proteinie cocktail. Oh my gosh. It's an espresso martini with a wild wing powder rub. It's a huge thing. Yeah. So don't say that taking the joy out of eating like this is their whole thing. Okay. So now I'm going to have to send you both a picture of me enjoying that. Okay. We would love that. We would love that. But perhaps the big note for this entire conversation is protein abides just eat. Yes. It's a lovely place to land. Sammy, Gavin, thank you so much. You have helped me think a lot better about this stuff. I appreciate you. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Sammy. Thank you so much. We'll include a link to Samantha Kane and Gavin Whedon's book on our show notes page.

26:03It's called protein, the making of a nutritional superstar. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, those little headphones at the bottom to find it.